yelvington.com

I’m a little stuck on teh chapter I’m writing for my book now: Googlewood, how movies, TV, and entertainment will change thanks to Google. I have plenty to say but I need one of those great surprising insights you all have (flattery will get me everywhere). So if you don’t mind, please help and share how entertainment can and will change in the Google age. As always, thanks!

San Diego Union-Tribune
Copley cites the tough times for newspapers  -- "especially those in a real-estate dependent market like San Diego" -- as its motivation in deciding to explore the company's strategic options. "We have every reason to believe the business will rebound with the economy, but the uncertainties pose too great a risk to sit still," says Copley executive vice president Harold W. Fuson Jr.
> Five other terrible years in modern newspaper history (CJR.org)

Chris Hedges gives a sermon from his high-church pulpit decrying the devil internet. It’s not worth the effort to fisk but it is notable for bringing together every claptrap curmudgeonly cliche imaginable. As a museum piece, it is notable. But it is also wrong in so may ways. He says:
The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print. All these forces have combined to strangle newspapers.

Oh, ferchrissakes. The decline of newspapers is about the irresponsible management of newspapers that did not take advantage of new opportunities and recognize new realities until it was too damned late. The corporate state he decries is exactly what is now suffering for its sins; see the billions in stock-market value lost. Post-literate? We’re reading more than ever. And I wonder whether rapidly moving images are somehow worse than merely moving images. To hell with talkies.

Sadly, he doesn’t stop:
The Internet will not save newspapers. So far, the really big advertisers have stayed away, either unsure of how to use the Internet or suspicious that it can’t match the viewer attention of older media.

That’s patently untrue and as out-of-date as everything else Hedges says. Big advertisers are all over the internet, but in a post-scarcity economy, they no longer have to pay the monopolistic prices of newspaper companies. You’d think Hedges might celebrate that, except that then he’d have to decide whom he hates more: news companies or the marketing companies that have supported them. Will the internet save newspapers? I don’t care. It’s journalism that matters to me. And the internet is doing wonders for journalism.
We live under the happy illusion that we can transfer news-gathering to the Internet.

Well, he’s right about the happy part. News alerady has come to the internet, where it is faster, more complete, more global, with more voices. Oh, why am I bothering? Oh, just one more:
Bloggers, unlike most established reporters, rarely admit errors.

I hope he corrects that gross and false generalization. But I doubt he will. Damned reporters.

Romenesko Misc.
Romenesko is told that one employee couldn't resist poking the Tribune chief's eyes out. (On the cake, of course.) The cake that was served in the newsroom on Thursday included a Sam Zell quote from earlier in the year about how cutting employees isn't the way to save a company. (The headline link takes you to a larger image of the cake.)

With all the journalists getting laid off in the newspaper industry bloodletting, have you noticed them looking younger?

I ask because I had my hair cut this morning, and I had a conversation with my stylist about gray hair. He’s in his 30s, but DYES his hair gray because he likes how it looks. (Huh?! Most of us with real gray hair would prefer to go the other direction.) Anyway, he told me that with the bad economy and lots of people getting laid off, his shop is seeing a big wave of guys in their 40s and 50s come in to get their hair dyed darker. It’s because they think looking younger will help them find new jobs, of course.

Have you noticed this among your journalist friends who’ve been laid off recently? Have you done it yourself?

Me? I’m sticking with what nature and time have done with my hair. Can’t say I like the gray, but I can live with it.

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Corporate Crime Reporter
In a lawsuit, General Electric accuses former in-house attorney Adriana Koeck of taking confidential company documents and giving them to former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston. Tax Notes International recently published Johnston's story about an alleged tax fraud scheme at General Electric's Brazilian subsidiary.

Here’s my latest Editor & Publisher Online column: “Web Integration on a Grander Scale.”

I present a model for moving beyond reader comments, and activating community-member contributions and participation at the article level.

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Creative Loafing
Journal-Constitution staffers signing the paper's severance agreement are barred from making "any disparaging or untrue statements about the company" or its employees. That's standard language in many severances, but Ken Edelstein says the wording "raises an awkward issue for the newspaper, which regularly extols transparency as an expectation for journalists along with others involved in public life." (Does your buyout deal include that language? Let Romenesko know -- anonymously, if you prefer. || UPDATE: I'm told that the Scripps papers, Poynter's St. Petersburg Times, the Chicago Tribune, and MediaNews' St. Paul Pioneer Press have non-disparagement clauses. No such clause: USA Today.) 

Nieman Watchdog
John Walcott is being honored for leading his staff in their probing, skeptical coverage of events during the run-up to the Iraq war at a time when most US news outlets failed to question the motives for the Iraq invasion. The I.F. Stone award is administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. || ALSO: How Walcott and his reporters went about their work.

What is it about media that causes governments - OK, apparently just our government here in the UK - to abandon its normal, very sensible objection to hypothecated taxation? What indeed is it about media that makes a poll tax look like a good idea? First the BBC, now music, it seems that media (especially digital media) is exempt from the common sense that saves us from this bizarre approach to filling the public purse.

The BBC is currently funded by the country's only hypothecated poll tax - a flat fee levied per head of population, irrespective of ability to pay, to meet a specific government spending objective. Rumours abound again today that the music industry is pushing for similarly special dispensation (though Charles at the Guardian thinks not). Both our current and our last Prime Minister agree that hypothecation is a bad idea (I don't think either has ever though it necessary to come out explicitly against poll taxes). So why this single exception for media? Very strange.

“A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you are talking real money,” goes a famous quote attributed to Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen, the late, gravel-voiced Republican leader from Illinois. The quote, which actually may not have been uttered by the great man, came to mind this morning when several sharp-eyed readers noted that I incorrectly stated here the price paid for the

Ryan Sholin has a typically thought-provoking post up about the future business model for journalism, calling the "broken business model of newspapers" the elephant in the room. In it he points out the unsolved problem of news shifting to digital - that the value of online news audiences is a fraction of the value of that same audience in print. (This is, broadly, the same point that Vin Crosbie has been making since at least 2006 and might most easily be abbreviated as The Impossibility of the Rusbridger Cross.)

Here's the bit I'm stuck on. As one of four news industry "givens", Ryan writes:

"Regardless of what else we change about our print edition, or how we present information online, or how we reorganize our newsrooms, funding investigative and enterprise reporting must be part of the core mission of the industry"

Taking a step back, this seems an extraordinary economic position. What other industry organises itself around the proposition "in this business it is a given that we must produce X. Now, can we get anyone to pay us enough money to produce X?"

If it costs £20 to dig a ton of coal out of the ground and people will only pay £15 per ton, no-one digs coal. At that point we stop digging coal and start...well, making computers or flipping burgers or farming or whatever other activity does make us money.

I'm not sure it's the business model that's broken here. Maybe the elephant in the room is a reluctance to even think of newspapers (or journalism or whatever you want to call it) in business terms. Because if we did, we wouldn't start with the premise "since we're definitely going to keep making journalism, how can we pay for it?" We'd already be thinking "is there enough of a market for journalism to keep doing it?" And nobody wants the answer to that question, because we kind of know already what it probably is.   

Associated Press
Excluding one-time charges -- which include goodwill and other charges based on the falling value of its assets -- Lee Enterprises earnings dropped 44.1% in the third quarter. Print advertising revenue declined 8.2%, and online advertising revenue increased 5.3%. || Read the release.

The most precariously financed newspaper deals apparently are starting to hit the wall, wiping out equity investors and causing at least some lenders to try to sell their loans at distressed prices. The lenders who provided the bonds for the $530 million purchase of the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2006 have hired an investment bank to try to sell the loans at heavy discounts to either local

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Originally uploaded by RobertAndrews.

Los Angeles Times
Broadcast networks have devoted more than twice as much airtime in recent weeks to Barack Obama than to John McCain, but don't assume that more coverage is always good coverage, says James Rainey. "Reports from the Mideast and back home in recent days have revealed that reporters were determined not to cut Obama any slack. That's only right."

Reuters | McClatchy
McClatchy's online advertising revenue grew 12.5% during the quarter, though total ad revenue fell 16.8% to $406.3 million. Net income slid to $19.7 million, or 24 cents per share, from $35.2 million, or 43 cents per share, a year ago. || Read the release.

yelvington: Implosion of the newspaper industry is like the dotcom collapse of 2001. Irrational investment followed by irrational disinvestment.

Washingtonian
More quotes from Harry Jaffe's piece on Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth:
* "There's a group of people who are not interested in the Post. We shouldn't have to stand on our heads and do cartwheels to get people we are not going to get. But we do have to give people a reason to read the paper."
* What Weymouth reads first in the Post: "Front page, then Metro, then Style. I'm a chick."

Politico.com
Wonkette's Ken Layne says that half-jokingly. He points out that "nobody would tolerate if, at the end of 'Meet the Press,' if a bunch of weirdos stormed the studio and started screaming weird racist stuff. Theyd call the police." Daniel Libit notes: "Websites ranging from the smallest of blogs straight through to the New York Times are struggling to discourage spammers and bomb-throwers without tamping down the larger, productive give-and-take."